Theodore Ereira-Guyer takes an interdisciplinary approach to his practice, meshing vocabularies of printmaking, sculpture and photography to encourage a new dialect of painting. His is a concept and a craft that, like the alchemist, brings to life a surface that lives not despite, but because of the deliberate demise of its previous incantations, be they technical, chemical or artful. Metal plates are firstly scratched and scarred with painterly flourishes of acid. These are generously doused in ink and plaster and then pressed and rolled against thick sheets of sumptuous paper. These etched sheets are then, in turn, translated onto plaster and cement surfaces. Whilst Ereira-Guyer employs various techniques that are centuries old, it is the conversation between the various chapters of his craft’s strategy that – both in symbiosis and contradistinction – elevates his process and his work out of the annals of art history.

Ereira-Guyer confronts its viewer with both familiarity and estrangement: one knows the whistles of trees and cool forest shadows and yet our experience of them, dancing across his monumental etched surfaces, are deliberately problematized by the artist’s insistence that gesture – and its flux – be at the forefront of our relationship with his surface. Land thus holds together its past with its presence, and it is this maelstrom between what is invented, forgotten and remembered that ironically feeds the artist’s rewarding choreography, unveiling a landscape bewitched by arabesques of memory and moment, agency and chance, and resulting in a ’scape of discovery that slowly ebbs away into haunting abandonment.